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Abstract: The article examines Platonov’s stories of 1938–1941 in the context of disputes about children’s books. In 1935, children’s literature was placed under the control of the Central Committee of the Komsomol, together with which children’s writers began to develop new principles for books for kids and teenagers. At regular meetings on children’s literature and on the pages of the literary-critical journal “Children’s Literature,” there was a polemic on several important issues relating to the education of the country’s young generation. One of the primary questions was whether the Soviet child needed humor and how to combine it with a heroic beginning. There was a need to create a Soviet “Tom Sawyer,” i. e., a children’s book that would have both an exciting plot and a certain moral. Everyone understood this moral in his own way. For the leaders of the Komsomol, it was communist. For writers, it took the abstract form of a child’s dream of great deeds and actions, extraordinary miracles of science and technology. In Platonov’s series of children’s stories, half of which refused to be published, morality was universal and even profoundly Christian.